“When hospitals created cardiac care units to treat patients recovering from heart attacks, Cochrane proposed a randomized trial to determine whether the new units delivered better results than the old treatment, which was to send the patient home for monitoring and bed rest. Physicians balked. It was obvious the cardiac care units were superior, they said, and denying patients the best care would be unethical.…” —Tetlock/Gardner.
We all know how this go.
“What people didn’t grasp is that the only alternative to a controlled experiment that delivers real insight is an uncontrolled experiment that produces merely the illusion of insight. … [Some] would say it worked; their opponents would say it failed. But nobody would really know. … [The government] had just assumed that its policy would work as expected. This was the same toxic brew of ignorance and confidence that had kept medicine in the dark ages for millennia.”
(https://gist.github.com/fasiha/447258e2d26eeb8f9405f5a2f989ec1f)
So. Two hashtags.
#NulliusInVerba: take no one’s 🤬 word for it.
#TBIC: Toxic Brew of Ignorance and Confidence.